Apropos of all the recent “new service, make moneys!” posts here lately, I just thought this article offered a curiously timed juxtaposition.
While much of the US$189 billion video-game industry is stagnant or shrinking, the appetite for web-based games […] is soaring. Sales for such titles […] were expected to triple from 2021 to 2028, reaching US$3.09 billion…
For time-pressed people, visiting a website — whether it’s on a PC or mobile phone — is fast and easy. No one has to boot up a console or download an app, and games can be picked up at any time, at home or between work shifts.
tl;dr – it’s Newgrounds all over again.
Now, just to be clear, I’m with the majority of people on this forum who are toiling away on passion projects in obscurity for zero expectation of compensation, on purpose. But, it strikes me, that – in contrast to the “new service, make moneys!” posts that talk about 30,000 word games or half a million word games – if you really wanted to make $ on commercial IF, maybe a way to go in this era is with some kind of micro-IF – short challenges that can be offered as a daily service, for the same kind of players who play Wordle or Spelling Bee or Framed. I think the important criteria (besides quality, of course) are regularity and brevity – ie, a dependable daily challenge that probably won’t take more than x minutes, and a victory state that can be shared with friends for bragging rights.
Not sayin’ I want it. Not sayin’ I want to make it. Just sayin’. Maybe you make something that gets bought by the NYT. Step 3, profit!
something about this just rings wrong to me—maybe I’m just sceptical that IF really fits with that level of brevity, at least if it’s combined with being a challenge and (presumably) not seeming trivial.
EDIT: Actually, maybe not. You could maybe do word puzzle type games that fit in that bucket. But on the other hand, I find parser better for that type of thing than choice, which is what the commercial proposals that seem to spring up are more focused on…
It would clearly require a different form of IF than the ones folks here are used to making. I’m a parser guy, and I’ve always maintained that text input sucks on mobile, though I have seen people here argue against that – but I can imagine a streamlined button-based parser game that’s playable on mobile, and no doubt people have made games like that already. Would Twine be a better platform for micro-IF games? I haven’t used it much, but seems like it would be.
For that matter, why don’t the folks around here post their work on Newgrounds more often? It’s still around, they accept HTML files, and the user base may be modest nowadays but how many views does the average IF get on any other platform anyway?
I might give it a try sometime and report back what happens.
Geoffrey Golden gave a NarraScope talk (2022) on “Adventure Snack”, which was an email newsletter of micro-IF games. Ran 100 issues in four years, he says.
Yeah, when I started reading around after finding that initial article, I was entertained / mildly surprised to find that Newgrounds is still a going thing.
Fallen London (and StoryNexus in general) seems to check several of those boxes! It’s all hosted and saved directly on the website and there’s:
Short bits of story with a daily cap, and potential for the content to last for weeks/months/years
A social element that can be leveraged
A subscription model for players who want more
I assume the project ended up being unprofitable in that case since StoryNexus mostly shut down (though Fallen London itself still seems to be going strong), but if it were deemed feasible I’d love to see a platform like this open up to submissions again!
But that’s not the entire picture. Wordle offers more features to subscribers, so I think it’s fair to say that Wordle is heavily subsidized by NYT subscribers. Hence, my joke about selling your hypothetical micro-IF project to the NYT.
Oh, right! So less of a unified experience, and more like logging in regularly to play the latest Supershort IF of the Day (or something along those lines)?
I wonder this a lot, myself. People talk about Itch a lot here, but Newgrounds hardly gets a mention. Could be because it doesn’t host jams or comps the same way, or because the culture there is less friendly to IF and related altgames. I couldn’t find any interactive fiction there, not that I looked very hard. Itch has a bigger IF tradition and a lot of IF creators are on Itch.
Not sure why people don’t crosspost, though. It helps more people see your stuff, and it’s basically free.
It could also be the review culture. Ratings and reviews on Itch very much operate on a “if you have nothing positive to say, say nothing” attitude. From what I’ve heard, the Itch algorithm makes it so any rating less than 5 stars tanks a game, so 4 stars and 1 star might as well be the same. So even though it doesn’t seem like it, the rating system on Itch boils down to like vs dislike, where like is 5 stars and dislike is everything else. Possibly for related reasons, the comments on an Itch game are usually just positive and there’s no expectation of critique, with the exception of some ranked competitions. Similar to AO3, which only has a Like button and no rating system, the Itch culture is there’s so much art out there and the vast majority is from hobbyists and/or kids, so there’s no point dumping on someone’s passion project and making them feel bad when you could just go look at something else. “Don’t like, don’t read” and all that.
Newgrounds is different. I don’t know what their rating algorithm is like, but people there give out low ratings and harsh criticism a lot more freely. It could be a barrier stopping some people. [Edit: It has been rightfully pointed out that this community’s review norms are closer to Newgrounds than Itch, so this likely wouldn’t be a barrier to people here. In the previous sentence, I was thinking mostly about the IF community on Tumblr and Itch.] Though that still doesn’t prevent 90% of Newgrounds’ newly released games from being completely awful. I went on the new games section as a registered user and most of it was just 30-second experiments with basically no content that people uploaded because they could.
Even if there’s more money in web games now, I still feel like Newgrounds is far past its prime, since mobile games have sucked up a lot of the kids that would otherwise be spending their free time on there.
When it comes to money, I know Newgrounds does something where the makers of the top rated games and animations of the month, maybe art and audio too, get a monetary prize. It’s somewhere in the hundreds of dollars, if I remember right. But it’s usually taken up by a ridiculously high-effort project that took several years and has general audience appeal with detailed visuals and audio, so I don’t know if a traditional IF game would have a shot at getting that.
All this is to say I have no answer and I guess more people, including me, should put stuff on Newgrounds, unless there’s a big reason not to that I’ve missed.
As you pointed out further up the thread, all you have to do to win is make something that becomes incredibly popular. So it seems like any form of IF that can do that is fair game.
I admit I’ve been thinking more along the lines of singular daily stories, maybe something detective oriented. Type Help suddenly comes to mind, if you could somehow make a minified version of that entertaining.
Pointing out Fallen London is interesting because immediately you can ask the question, what was it made them successful? (A new thought for me, though no doubt plenty of other folks here have already given it lots of thought.) Was it purely the quality of their content? The format? Were they especially good at building a community of players? In keeping with the theme of the inciting article – websites dominating apps – what was it that brought people back to their website every day?
I went to look at storynexus . com and found that there’s also a story-nexus . com which is 100% AI content and just another example of why I hate AI content, but, and I apologize in advance for this, come on, this is too funny:
